Making the rules

The thirteen-year-old wanted to play Heroclix today, which means that she volunteered to get out all the stuff and put it all away when the game is over, so yeah!

We've never really worked out a solid set of house rules, instead attempting to play most of the Heroclix rules with occasional simplifications. It doesn't work that well. Possibly because we're all drawing from the same pool of characters, possibly because some aspects of the official rules are A PAIN IN THE ASS!, I don't know. So, after some discussion with the kids, here's what we came up with.

First of all, we've got a reasonable pool of figures to draw from and we want to be able to use all of them. Therefore, no one is considered "retired" at our house. (That probably goes without saying.)

We also like to play so that there aren't any duplicate characters on the board (just one Batman, just one Spider-Man, etc.) unless they're actually different individuals in the same costume. We don't worry about whether these characters would have actually interacted in continuity--maybe this is one of those time travel things, after all. So, for example, we could have three or four Robins out there at once if desired. (I realize that we could also use the time travel rationalization to justify the presence of multiple versions of the same character, but so far this has not seemed desirable.)

This isn't usually much of a problem since we're all drawing from the same pool of figures. Generally we spend a fair amount of time forming our teams, taking turns choosing a piece at a time. So far we've had relatively little argument of the "but I wanted to use Starfire!" sort.

(One of the difficulties with everyone using the same set of figures--apart from the occasional disagreement over who gets who--is that you don't really know your pieces that well while you're playing. I'm assuming that in a normal game, where everyone brings their own, you've probably got a pretty good idea of what your characters can do at different points because you looked at them in detail ahead of time. When you choose the pieces immediately before playing, you can't really do that. )

Next, the pushing thing. "Pushing" means that if you move the same figure more than one turn in a row, it takes damage, and you place tokens by the pieces in order to remember which have been moved recently. I see the point in the game, it makes sense. The pushing itself isn't the problem. However, having to keep track of move tokens? It's probably the reason we don't play more often than we do.

Then, the turns. In Heroclix, the bigger the teams (well, the higher the total point value, which works out to roughly the same thing), the more moves each person gets to make during their turn. Now, the kids like big teams. They like at least 1000 points and prefer more--which if you follow the rules means that everyone gets 10 moves or more per turn. A nine-year-old gets a little bored waiting for twenty moves while the other two players take their turns. And a nine-year-old takes a heck of a long time making her own ten (or more) moves.

So today we tried one move per turn. Not having to get out the poker chips (which is what we've used as tokens, placing one under a piece that's been moved) was a nice change, and it's remarkably easy to keep track of the figures you moved last turn when there was only one--requiring no tokens because we all know who moved what last, which makes the pushing thing relatively painless. It's a more exciting game without the long waits, and while I'm sure it interferes with some potential strategizing, for us the tradeoff in playability is worth it.